Johnson punched the dashboard in the rented maroon Grand Am trying to get the radio going, to intercept the upholstered quiet inside this car, to blot out the crunch and squeal of chain-reacting brakes on the outside. Heavy traffic today. It was a Friday afternoon in Philadelphia, he reminded himself, Philadelphians drove stupid on Fridays. Even in the 1990s he still knew Philadelphia after all; born here, died here too in a sense. Had had to leave here in a jones-induced flourish more than twenty years ago to shed his skin, to reemerge as he was now, a restored version of his better self. He was back here this time on business. The advance man for a Chicago-based Institute for Human Potential that raised funds for nonprofits. He was the mission maker, a master in fact at recasting, or even formalizing organizational missions that could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars for deserving entities willing to write his employer into the contract as an administrative cost. Here it was a from-the-grounds-up program benefiting boys at risk, like he’d been a boy at risk, even though he’d been finger-pointed as a boy with promise.
He jumped at the chance to come back here, live here for the next two months. At least his heart did: he’d be closer to Verdi’s cousin Kitt, his true and abiding friend; and Kitt’s mother, Posie; and maybe, maybe even Verdi. Foolish to wish for closeness with Verdi he told his heart as he slammed on his brakes and then switched lanes and then cursed because he’d ended up behind a SEPTA bus. Hadn’t she refused to spend some time every other time he’d been back he reminded his heart as he turned the radio up loud to drown out the thought that this time it would be different. How could it be? Wasn’t she still with him, Rowe, her once college professor who’d swooped in like such a fearless knight to save Verdi from herself, and from him. And hadn’t he, Johnson, been responsible for her tasting hell after all.
He sighed and adjusted the volume on the radio and resigned himself to being behind this bus and the fact that he was going to have to bump and grind through this rush-hour traffic all the way back to his City Avenue apartment. A dose of Johnny Hartman blaring through the radio singing “Just the Thought of You” melted down his throat like a cherry-flavored lozenge and took the edge off of his trek through West Philly near where he used to live. He looked beyond the bus to try to picture this corner before this Amoco gas station was here.
When it was a three-story apartment building where his dead brother’s best friend Bug lived. Dealt drugs. OD’d. Saw himself there on Bug’s orange vinyl couch under the Jimi Hendrix poster. Shook the thought. Concentrated instead on the mixer he needed to attend tonight with an association of probation officers. They’d be valuable stake holders, and could attract significant dollars.
Troubled Waters Foundation. That’s the name change that had been swimming around since he’d taken this assignment. Hadn’t voiced it to his bosses yet. But he liked the sound of it, so did the woman he’d sipped ginger ale with two nights in a row at the hotel lounge across the street, she’d talked about the possibility for metaphor for whoever had to write the ad copy. He’d tried to explain that it wasn’t ad copy, but she was a burned-out copywriter so that’s how she thought, she told him.
He pulled into the underground parking lot and took the long way around to get into his building. Turned the key and pushed the door open on his one-bedroom efficiency that smelled of day-old Chinese takeout. He’d complained twice about the cleaning service, they wouldn’t do a white boy like this, he muttered. He sat on the side of the bed and picked up the phone and hit the numbers to retrieve his messages. Kitt’s voice pushed into his ear.
“Good news bad news, Johnson, baby. Verdi said that she won’t see you. Surprise, surprise. But I still want to invite you over for Sage’s eighth birthday party. Next Saturday, the day before Easter. No she won’t be here. Call me and tell me what you want special for me to cook for you. And Mama said you’ve avoided her each time you’ve been back before and if she doesn’t see you this time somebody’s getting their butt kicked. My words not hers.”
He lay across the bed and drew his hand down his face. Had to just accept that it wasn’t their season. That’s one thing the brutality of his past had taught him. Everything happens right on time no matter how long it takes.
It appeared that everything was happening right on time as Johnson sat at his mother’s oppressively sad kitchen in October of 1971 thinking that he’d always had only two options: college or death. At least that’s how it had been staged out among his three older brothers. The oldest dead in a metaphoric sense, in jail, the result of running a package for a friend; the package was filled with two ounces of uncut heroin and Johnson’s brother refused to name the friend he was running for, where he was running it to. The next oldest brother dead for real, when his helicopter was brought down in the U Minh Forest of the Mekong Delta. The third brother, Thompson, closest to Johnson in age, had navigated the land mines in their West Philly neighborhood and avoided jail, gone to college instead, Cheyney, majored in secondary education and ended up teaching phys ed and coaching the award-winning chess team at Vare Junior High until he fell away and moved to San Diego with his bride and didn’t visit often because he couldn’t breathe in his mother’s sadness.
Johnson followed in that brother’s footsteps easily, even as he made his own tracks to surpass him, to do what he could to patch up the shredded lining in his mother’s heart that showed so in the creases around her mouth when she tried to smile.
He’d always been certain that he would go to college. Before he was picked out by the guidance counselors at West Philly High to be part of a special program that sent him to enrichment classes at the computer lab at the university, before his soaring SAT scores that had recruiters licking stamps to him from Bucknell to Holy Cross, before every other program for the disadvantaged scrambling in 1971 for lucrative federal matching dollars tried to claim him as their poster boy, the success story, the one raised by a poor single mother in the impoverished, intellectually devoid slums of the city who triumphed after all. He knew he’d go to college much before the helpers swarmed.
He’d always excelled in geometry. Gifted when it came to shapes: naming them; measuring them; positioning them; predicting changes in them over time; determining their functions on a graph, in an equation, a schema, a room. “I’m gonna build you your dream house, Mom,” he’d told her after he’d been accepted to the university. “I’m majoring in architecture, and opening my own firm, and then I’m gonna design and build houses for you and all the hardworking beautiful black mothers just like you.”
He’d actually been building her houses of sorts since he could remember. Out of wooden building blocks that he’d sneak home, one or two a week from his kindergarten class; out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue in the third grade; out of pinocle cards, a game that he played like a pro from the time he was twelve; out of cut glass and clay, a solar-powered house that had been his science project and took second place in the all-city competition his junior year in high school. And now out of his textbooks as he sat at his mother’s kitchen table this Friday evening itching to get back to campus, to Verdi’s room, to her cheerful naïveté that so begged for him to teach her things. He piled two books horizontally on top of the spines of two more and asked his mother if she could cut his meat loaf extra thick, and sop it in gravy because there was someone he wanted to share it with.
“Who?” she asked. “Turtle? Rev? Counselor? Moose? Tower? Medic?” She knew them all by their nicknames, these other scholarship students who’d crowd around her table during semester breaks when they couldn’t afford traveling fare home and wolf down her good home cooking as if they didn’t know when their next meals would come.
Sometimes they didn’t, Johnson told her, melting her heart with stories of how this one couldn’t buy a ticket to get back to Oakland over Thanksgiving nor could that one who lived outside of Cleveland, and they were going to have to dine with the skid rowers at a soup kitchen on Ridge Avenue because they were out of money. So Johnson’s mother, who had a throbbing soft spot for young men, having already lost her second son to the war, insisted that they all come to her house, and even overspent so that she could cook twice the volume and send each young man back to the dorm with mountainous go-plates to tide them over until the university started feeding them again. But after she lost her oldest son to prison, and her third to a new wife and geography, she would sift in and out of depressions that had Johnson stroking and kicking to keep from drowning under the weight of the air in her house.
“So which guy is it?” she asked again. Her voice distant and tired as she talked into the pan she’d just pulled from the oven.
“It’s not a guy,” Johnson said to his mother’s back. He unstacked the books he’d been building and laid them out end to end.
“Not a guy? Then must be a girl,” she asked and answered at the same time as she glanced over her shoulder at him and then turned back to spoon continuous clumps of white rice onto a plate.
“Yeah, some girl from Georgia. Verdi’s her name,” he said as he reassembled the books to bring them to a point.
“Verdi. From Georgia, huh? And she’s not cooking for you? You taking food to her?” She laid two thick slabs of meat loaf over the rice and washed the top with brown gravy. “Southern girls learn how to cook early, you know.”
“Come on, Mom, she’s a freshman,” he said as he watched the gravy edge to the crust of the meat loaf and just hang there as if deciding whether or not to fall.
“Well, why haven’t you brought her past?”
“No big deal, Mom, she’s just a friend.” He moved the books around some more as his mother walked the plate to the table and just stood there looking down at him. He didn’t return the look; didn’t want to. He knew that her expression would be a fatigued hurt, as if even her sadness was tired of being sad, the skin under her eyes thick and sacky, her mouth turned in an upside-down U, set, like a plaster-of-paris mold. He couldn’t remember when she’d lost her beauty, her ability to take over a room with her smile. But sometimes lately he’d look at her and her face would be so sallow, so drained of faith and hope and the robustness that used to make her brown face so inviting to gaze upon. Sometimes her despair was so exposed and magnified on her face that even in his manhood it frightened him and he’d want to run and hide himself in the pleats of her skirt the way he did when he was a child. He guessed she’d have that effect on him now so he rested his head on his arm and fiddled with the books.
She set the plate down on the table. Waited for him to look at her as she watched him playing with the books, shuffling them one way then another. Sighed then to the top of his head when he still didn’t look up at her. “She must be a big deal seeing as how you bring all of your other friends past. Especially when they’re hungry.” She yawned as she went back to the stove. “I’ll put the string beans in a separate dish, a good-size dish,” she said, “that way I can load her up on them, nothing beats hunger like some fresh string beans in a cornstarch-thickened base the way I do mine.”
“She’s not exactly what you would call hungry, Mom,” he said, struggling to keep from getting defensive about not bringing Verdi by. It was true, he had ushered all of his friends in and out of his mother’s house since he’d been at the university, her house just a ten-minute bus ride from campus, a half-hour walk if they were quarterless. Even the ones from money he’d not hesitated to show the modest house where he was raised; he reminded himself of that now, bolstering himself so that he wouldn’t have to admit to the unforgivable in his mind, being embarrassed about his mother when it came to Verdi. Now he looked at his mother’s back as she stirred around in the pot of string beans. She had a pink crocheted sweater over her shoulders, the silver beads that held her glasses around her neck peeked unevenly through the top of the sweater’s open-weave stitch. Her black-and-gray hairline was tapered in an oval and a few strands hung longer than the others and poked against the sweater’s yarn. At least her back was easier on his eyes; the pink sweater made her appear soft and young.
“Well, why am I sending her half of my good meat loaf if she’s not hungry?” she asked, reaching for her slotted spoon from the Maxwell House coffee can she used as a utensil holder.
“’Cause I’m always bragging about the culinary skills of my dear, sweet mom.” He tried to make his voice go light to deflect the heaviness sighing in the air. “And she’s always talking about her cousin who lives somewhere in West Philly too, and we just have this silly bet, you know, I told her that my sweet generous mom could probably cook her cousin under the table any day of the week.”
“Well, I just hope she’s nice,” she said as she spooned string beans into a bowl.
“What’s nice got to do with meat loaf, Mom?”
“Can you see to it that I get my good dishes back, please, she’s a rich girl from Georgia, I know she’ll appreciate that this is good china.”
“Who said she’s rich? And don’t switch subjects on me, Mom. I’m talking about food and you’re asking me if she’s nice and now you’ve even decided that she’s rich. How in the world do you make those leaps?”
“Well, for starters you just sat there and formed and re-formed those books a half a dozen times and you keep coming back to the letter V. Secondly, you keeping your face from me like you got something to hide. I agree, don’t have a thing to do with meat loaf. But it does have everything to do with being known by the company you keep, so like I already said, I just hope she’s nice. And as for the rich part, I can just tell. Am I right?”
“She’s nice, Mom; she’s very, very nice.”
“And rich?” Her arm hung in midair between the pot and the bowl as she waited for him to answer.
“I think her people have a little money, yeah.” He didn’t know why a lump came up in his throat when he said it. As if he’d betrayed his mother somehow, or why the air in the kitchen was bearing so heavily on him he felt a tightness in chest as if the air was getting ready to close in on him and cause him to suffocate. He thought about just leaving the plates, just running through the house and out of the front door so that he could breathe, so that he could have respite from his mother’s hurting wrinkled face that he couldn’t do a thing about. He couldn’t be the son she buried in the ground, nor the one she buried in her heart; couldn’t be the man who walked out on her; and right now, being her last-born child, a shining sophomore at the university espousing all that being young, gifted, and black entailed, right now being who he was, Johnson, wasn’t enough.
She set the bowl of string beans on the table next to the plate of meat loaf and rice. The skin on her hands was still smooth and tight the way he’d always remembered her hands, efficient as she tore off plastic wrap and covered the plate and then the bowl.
“I first thought you might stay and have some dinner with me, but since this is a girl, from Georgia, that you taking this to, I won’t put any pressure on you.”
“No, I’ll stay, Mom.” His voice was pleading. “Come on and take us both up plates to eat now, I’ll stay.” She’d always had a gift for doing this, getting him to beg to do something for her that he really didn’t want to. Like now. More than anywhere right now he wanted to be in Verdi’s dorm room sharing the meat loaf and rice with her. Had even picked up a dime bag of joint to introduce her to. Had Isaac Hayes and Otis Redding albums packed and waiting on the chair by the front door. Had two fresh condoms tucked into the seam of his wallet. Had hopes for this Friday night with Verdi that after they went to a BSL and faculty advisers–sponsored party at the high-rise and then tipped back to her dorm room buzzing from wine and cheese, she might let him all the way into her moistness. So close, so very close they’d come the weekend before, and the one before that; and before that even. The past five weekends he’d spent Friday night at her dorm, easy to do because she had a single room so no roommate to displace. They’d even come to be known as a couple around campus. But instead of grabbing the food up, his albums, his sadness, and scurrying like a squirrel at snow’s approach running, running to catch the D bus that would zoom him down Chestnut Street and into Verdi’s presence, he was pasted in the kitchen chair, begging his mother to let him have dinner with her.
“No, no, you get on back to school, now, I insist. How you gonna keep you and hers food hot if you sitting up here having dinner with me?”
“They have toaster ovens in the lounge.”
She ignored him, though she was grateful for the gesture, really. But she truly didn’t want to burden him more than he was already burdened being her youngest son. What could she share with him right now save her grief that was welling up in the corners of her eyes. “Let me get you a couple of bags,” she said, walking quickly to the shed kitchen so she could turn her eyes away from him.
“Mom,” he said again, drawing the word out in a long breath that wanted to cry. “Come on, please, let’s have dinner together.”
“No, you go on, now. Not tonight,” she called from the shed kitchen. “We’ll have dinner together another night.”
“Why not? What? Do you have plans or something?” he asked, hoping that she did, that maybe she had reconnected with friends she used to have, or met a man, or joined a church, a Bible study group. He thought about the oversized black leather Bible that Verdi kept on her desk. He suddenly wished that his mother had forced him to go to church when he was growing up. Then at least he’d have something to offer her right now, he could tell her to pray for the return of a little joy. Verdi was always talking about praying for this and for that as if praying was something she did as easily as breathe.
“I’ll double these bags over so the juice doesn’t leak through,” his mother said as she walked back into the kitchen. “You sure don’t want your clothes smelling like string-bean juice and you’re on your way to see some rich girl from Georgia.”
“Verdi, her name’s Verdi, Mom.”
“I’m sorry, son, I didn’t mean to disrespect her by not calling her by name. I know those southerners are big on respect.” She pushed one bag into the other and stood it up on the table. “How you planning on carrying all this plus your books on the D bus.”
“I’ll manage, even though I want you to know that I could be carrying half the amount of food if you’d let me eat my dinner right now, here with you.”
“Hand me that plate here, please.” She talked right over him. “Maybe I should use two separate bags,” she said as she sized up the food on the table as if this was the most crucial decision she’d ever have to make.
He passed her the plate and she lowered it into the bag and then followed with the bowl of string beans. “Okay, this works out fine,” she said as she rolled the top of the bag down. “Just try to support the bottom as best you can.”
He didn’t say anything, just looked down at the bag. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him, it was warm in here. Wasn’t she unbearably hot in that sweater? he wondered. Then he met her gaze, her eyes were moist and the moistness was spreading out and getting lost in the thick folded skin around her eyes. He grabbed her to him, then. Squeezed the tops of her arms and then circled all of her against his chest, whispered, “Thanks, Mom, for the meal. Love you.”
He could feel her head nodding against his chest. Now she was pushing him away telling him to go, telling him to go right this minute while the D bus was still running with regularity. Telling him to support the bottom of the bag and don’t forget his books. Telling him to work hard. Telling him to say hello for her to Tower and Turtle and Medic and the rest. And the girl from Georgia. “Verdi. Tell her your mother sends her regards too.”
Johnson had not planned on such a lengthy stay at his mother’s kitchen table this Friday evening and now he was late getting to Verdi’s dorm room to accompany her to the party in the roof-top lounge of the high-rise dorm where the black students and their faculty advisers were supposed to connect. He’d just made it to the corner of Chestnut Street to see the D bus rolling by, yelled and ran behind it to no avail somewhat slowed down by the heavy bags he carried. He cursed and waited on the solitary corner and tried to scatter the image stuck in his mind right now of his mother in that house all alone where the air was heavy and still. It was dark out already and that made the scene in his mother’s kitchen even more cheerlessly fixed in his mind so he decided to keep moving, move his body and his mind would have to become unfixed and follow, he reasoned.
He walked the three blocks quickly down and over to Market Street to catch the el. Had to argue with the cashier to get him to accept his transfer; the transfer actually being from the day before but often the fare takers didn’t care enough to check. This one did check and Johnson was severely agitated because the man was a brother and violating the unspoken practice that unless one was a severe Uncle Tom, a brother always let another brother slide in such a harmless case as this. Johnson held his agitation at bay so that he wouldn’t blow up and instead was able to offer up a tearjerker of a story that begged for violins about being a broke university student trying to get back to campus. True though it was, especially now that his father was on a new wife and pleading poverty, had barely advanced Johnson money for books, Johnson heightened the melodrama so there would be a hint of doubt. Even though this was the early seventies and the rejection of material excess was often a lauded and fashionable trait, and even though he wore his poverty around his neck as if it were his heavy silver-toned peace medallion, he was sometimes deeply embarrassed by how lacking were his financial resources, particularly surrounded by the relative opulence of the university. He reminded himself to check where he was on the waiting list for a minimum-wage-paying work-study job, if nothing was forthcoming in the immediate short term he’d be forced to look off-campus where an employer wouldn’t be as sensitive to a student’s time constraints, he made a mental list of places to apply as the el jerked him back and forth and carried him swiftly to within a short walk of Verdi’s dorm.
More fast talking to do to the security on the front desk at Verdi’s dorm who at first wouldn’t let him through because whoever had answered the phone on Verdi’s hall said she wasn’t responding to their door knocks. He tried Cheryl, the sister who lived upstairs from Verdi, whenever Verdi wasn’t in her own room he usually found her there. Not tonight. Went through the list of the few black students who he knew lived in this dorm, no answers from them either. He finally reached a white girl he knew fairly well because she’d been active in black causes, she okayed Johnson up and he went straight to Verdi’s room and found a note on the door telling him that she’d tried to wait but had decided to walk on over to the high-rise dorm with her history professor and his wife who’d had dinner in her dining hall as part of a University Life–sponsored student-faculty mixer. He went into the lounge and left his bag with books and crammed his mother’s meat loaf and string beans into the tiny refrigerator, thought about it, pulled a Hi-Liter pen from his bag and wrote on the food bag in huge block letters DO NOT TOUCH IF YOU LOVE TO LIVE.
He got to the high-rise dorm and more security to go through where he had to leave his matric card at the front desk to gain entrance to the party that was in the roof-top lounge. This party was already in high gear, he could see that as he stepped off of the elevator and angled himself through the double glass doors. Though the food was sparse, a little celery and dip, cheese and crackers, deviled eggs, the drink cascaded bountifully as the faculty advisers went blind to the bottles of wine being quickly emptied from the cases stacked neatly under the skirted table. The lights were dim and the walls were sweating and all sizes of Afros nodded and bobbed as intelligent brown bodies swayed and bounced to War and Sly and the Temptations in a Mellow Mood. They were loose and laughing with abandon in the way that people do when they’ve spent all week fighting to be seen as more than a special case, a slot, aid recipient, the product of a partnership with the city, state, feds. At least that was how Johnson felt most of the time; for all of his rhetoric about not allowing the racist tactics to make them have a diminished view of themselves, he often did.
Johnson squinted through the dimness trying to find Verdi; stopped every few steps to do the elaborate Black Handshake with “his boys,” and to give the ladies a peck on the cheek. He was well known here, respected as a Philly man, tough and intellectually gifted, worked hard, partied hard, got in the faces of people who offended him, but always fair. Never flung on his hard-core, urban-boy street attitude unless it was absolutely necessary—and never did at all to people from New York City.
“You seen that pretty Georgia freshman?” he asked Tower, the six-four basketball player from the boonies in upstate Pennsylvania.”
“Yeah, yeah, man, I did.” He laughed and slapped Johnson’s hand. “Fucking real, man, over there at that other end of the room, or the middle of the room, or some fucking where.” He laughed again, this time doubled over he laughed so hard.
“Hey, man, what you been doing?” Johnson asked, his face halfway between serious and amused.
Tower leaned down and whispered in Johnson’s ear, “A little of this, a little of that.”
“Little of what, man, wine, weed, speed, what?”
“Just a little killer smoke, man. From my little killer pipe.”
“Well, you keep it a little, you country bastard. And you make sure you know what you getting and who you getting it from.” He reached up and shook Tower’s shoulders. “You with me, man.”
“Lighten the fuck up, Johnson my brother man. And then maybe you should light the fuck up your damn self so you can shut the fuck up.” More bent-over laughter. “In case if you didn’t notice, there’s a party going on in here and shit.”
Johnson slapped Tower’s palm. “Solid, man,” he said. “Advice well taken, except I hope I don’t get as silly as your wasted, country ass.” He was getting ready to ask him who’d he copped from anyhow, but right then he spotted Verdi and he surprised himself at the surge he got when he finally saw her face.
She was bubbling over with laughter like everybody in this roof-top lounge seemed to be laughing. Standing between her history professor and his wife, her solid softness molded into tight black jeans, thick leather belt with an oversized silver peace-sign buckle cinched in her waist, white cotton shirt added dimension to her slightly formed top and gave her a wholesome crispness so contradicted by the seductive fit of the jeans that it was exciting to him right now. Verdi was saying something to the wife that made her throw her head back and show the fillings in her molars; the professor smiling at Verdi as if she were his protégée and she’d just done something to make him very proud. Johnson got a tinge of an emotion that he couldn’t define watching the professor watching Verdi so, at first he thought it was jealously, but he shook that off as ridiculous and settled on that maybe it was Verdi’s ability to captivate these two. How seamless was Verdi’s interaction with them right now, like matching patches of silk stitched end to end with a delicate thread. Johnson felt like the odd patch right now as he walked toward them, like flax, or burlap; corrugated with an itchy roughness, and poor. Until Verdi looked his way, and their gazes met, and her eyebrows arched as if to say, Johnson, is that you? And even in the darkened room he could see her face opening up for him, her smile going beyond the gracious and polite shared with the professor and his wife. This smile for him right now was effusive, her healthy lips stretched all the way from earlobe to earlobe, her downwardly slanted eyes almost closed she grinned so. He felt his chest swell when she smiled at him like that. He was dignified right now. A worthy man. An honest man. A weakened man right now because he knew for sure that he was a man falling in love.
She waved him over, called out his name, laughing as she did. “Hi, Johnson, ’bout time you showed up.”
“Now, you know I was going to show up,” he said as he entered their circle. He pulled her gently, loosely in his arms and kissed her cheek, then extended his hand first to the wife then to the professor.
“So this is the Johnson you’ve been telling us about?” the wife asked. “So nice to finally meet you.” She nodded approvingly at Johnson and he caught a glint in her eye that told him that she was sincere enough. Plus her attire, a tan suede western-style vest with fringes topping bell-bottom jeans topping more tan suede on the boots, also fringed, gave her a casual air that didn’t smack of the I-am-a-professor-and-I-control-your-fate image being cast around by her husband right now who was excessively tweeded down from sport coat to button-down vest to pants.
He told her how much he liked her vest and she shook her head, thank you, said she’d picked it up down at Sansom Village. “I just love the revolutionary energy in that place. Don’t you?” she asked.
The professor cleared his throat then, threw his head back and drained the sherbet and 7UP punch. “Well, speaking of revolutionary energy,” he said, clearing his throat again and reaching his tweeded arm between Johnson and Verdi to toss his cup in the trash can that was beginning to overflow, and then moving all the way between them to mash the cup solidly in. “It seems as if you’ve given this freshman some bad advice.”
“That’s debatable, Rowe.” The wife cut him off.
“Anything’s debatable, Penda,” he said, his jaw muscles shifted, and he made a sound that was somewhere between a sniffle and a snort, as if an unpleasant aroma had just wafted by.
“Later, please, Rowe,” Penda said as she tried to lock eyes with Rowe and Johnson could tell that she wasn’t the type of woman who was likely to just roll over in public to spare an argument with her mate.
Rowe didn’t look at Penda though, didn’t look anywhere in particular, just looked out into the room as if he were about to begin lecturing to an auditorium filled with eager, terrified freshmen who’d heard how demanding he was. His voice was pointed, as if it were his finger going right to Johnson’s chest. “All of this, this business we’ve been hearing from Verdi about the white professors at this institution wanting to pick somebody’s brain, is nonsense, just nonsense,” he said.
Verdi looked at Johnson apologetically. “I was just saying to Rowe and Penda,” Verdi rushed her words, “when they asked me if I’d gotten to know any of my professors that I was honestly a little hesitant of letting them pick my brain, which led me to tell them about the conversation we’d had about that, you remember, don’t you, Johnson?” She held Johnson’s gaze as she spoke, which he took to mean that she hadn’t quoted him in a negative way.
Johnson did remember, knew exactly what Verdi was talking about. He had warned her that the white professors often wanted to get inside of the heads of the black students, as if they were at the university not as students trying to get a degree like everybody else, but as guinea pigs, research subjects, a valuable source of data, and since the university was footing the bill for many of them anyhow, they should be willing to give back in this way. He’d insisted to Verdi that she shouldn’t feel obligated to put out a whole lot of excess effort helping them to understand her, or by extension all black people everywhere, that she didn’t owe anybody shit.
“I’m inclined to agree with your wife, Professor.” Johnson looked at Penda and smiled when he said it. “It is debatable.”
“Let me give you my perspective, young man,” Rowe said, this time he did look at Johnson, his tone more conciliatory. “Not engaging professors in meaningful dialogue because one is afraid that one’s brain might be picked is a practice that borders on being a negligent student. One passes up the opportunity to get a greater insight into the teaching community here at the university, and also, quite frankly, a shot at a better grade.”
“Uh, well, Professor, I guess you would have had to have been privy to the entire conversation, you know, before and after we got to that part in order to get the full gist of what I meant.”
Rowe didn’t answer. He just looked away and scanned the room and moved his shoulders slightly to the beat of the music and smiled as if he suddenly realized that he was enjoying himself.
“Hey, you missed my cousin, Kitt,” Verdi said brightly. “I wanted you to meet her, but she couldn’t stay. I’ve been trying to get her down on campus for the longest and when she does come she only stays for ten minutes.”
Rowe cleared his throat again. “Probably uncomfortable.”
“Oh Rowe, that’s not true,” from Penda, agitation clouding her voice. “That young woman didn’t seem uncomfortable in the least.”
“I’m willing to bet that she was,” Rowe said mildly, trying but not really trying to hide the disdain running through his voice. “How would you feel on a set like this, some of the best and brightest young black people on the planet gathered in this room, and you’re from one of Philadelphia’s rougher neighborhoods with no real aspirations to be part of this set in the first place, now you can’t tell me you aren’t going to experience a level of discomfort. Look at you, and you.” He motioned first to Johnson, then to Verdi, kept his eyes on Verdi then. “You’re in a different league, a very select league, and it’s unfortunate, but you’re on a track where often people can’t follow you, even someone as close as your cousin seems to be to you in an emotional way.”
Verdi didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted, Johnson could tell by the confusion trekking across her forehead. “Well.” Johnson reached across Rowe and touched Verdi’s elbow, her cotton shirt was soft and stiff at the same time and more than anything right now he wanted to feel all of her against him. “Uh, that’s a provocative notion, I guess. Definitely more grist for the debating team, I guess. But if you’ll both excuse me, it’s a Friday night and this is a party.” He emphasized “is.” “And I came to dance, so how ’bout it Lady V.”
He led Verdi away from the wall where his self-restraint had just gotten a good workout farther into the center of the room that had become the dance floor. “Hey, hey,” he shouted playfully as he inched between the throngs of moving arms and shoulders and hips. “Can’t a brother get some place on the floor to get a groove on with this sweet, sweet freshman from Georgia?”
Verdi blushed and her cheekbones went so round he just wanted to pull her close and kiss one then the other.
“Awl, Johnson, if you want some room now you got to take it,” someone called from the center of the circle.
“Dig it,” from farther along the edge, “isn’t that what he’s always telling us when he gets his James Brown thing going, talking ’bout don’t nobody give him a thing, just open the damned door and he’ll get it his damned self.”
The room exploded in laughter and they did make room for Johnson and Verdi but the fast song was over and now the Temptations were singing “With These Hands I Will Cling to You.” And Johnson realized that this was his first slow dance with Verdi. They both realized it simultaneously, it seemed, and they went stiff and just stood there giggling nervously. And she put one hand out and he reached for the opposite then she extended her other hand and he reached for the first. And they laughed some more then he took both her hands in his and they swayed to the beat and only their hands touched and their eyes and that’s how they danced their first slow dance together, almost two feet apart.
When the song was over he squeezed her hands, said, “Thank you, pretty freshman from Georgia. That has got to be the most unusual and by far the most satisfying slow dance I have ever taken part in.”
She blushed through her cheeks again and this time he did lean in and kiss her right on her fleshy lips; it wasn’t a long kiss but definitely intense and then they just stood there communicating with one another with their eyes and he didn’t even have to ask her if she was ready to leave as he covered her hand in his and led her away from the dance floor in the center of the room. And if people said anything more to him as they headed for the double glass doors, he didn’t know it. Didn’t stop to do another black handshake or lightly kiss another young lady on the cheek. And though he did want to turn around and look back in the direction of the professor and his wife, see if the professor was watching them—watching Verdi really—he didn’t. Just squeezed Verdi’s hand harder inside of his and led her; he so loved—so needed—to lead her and rightly sensed that she thrilled in his being her guide. And he knew this for sure tonight, that Verdi was his for tonight, and he was hers and whatever she wanted, if he could, he’d do.
Johnson was surprised at how easily, how quickly Verdi came. He’d never been with a virgin, even his first time when he was in high school was with a woman four years his senior whose flat tire he’d changed late one night when he was walking home from a party. She was so grateful that he’d come along and rescued her on that deserted stretch that she offered him a ride to wherever he wished, plus a half-hour detour through the park where she’d more fully expressed her gratitude by drowning him in her experience. After that episode there had only been two others, one had been a grade-school crush who was rebounding from a relationship with a running-around football player and used Johnson to take out her revenge. He didn’t mind being exploited in that way; he was eighteen and perpetually aroused and though this was the seventies the sexual revolution hadn’t made an impression on the girls he knew. His only other conquest had been nicknamed Scamp, and he’d felt sorry for her and spent time with her only to give her some relief from the brutish treatment she’d become accustomed to from the more low-life neighborhood thugs. At least that’s what he’d told himself the summer between freshman and sophomore year when they’d do it standing up in the alley behind her house where ivy grew wild and curtained them. He was glad that none of his couplings prior to Verdi were virgins because of the low-level emotional attachment. He’d heard often enough what an arduous time it could be when it was the first time for the girl; that they’d cry and bleed and just want to be held.
Not Verdi. Though she’d started off shyly enough, squeezing his hand and giggling the four-block walk from the party in the high-rise back to her dorm, blushed each one of the half a dozen times when he turned her face to his and gave her an openmouthed kiss and said that he just needed momentary relief from the October chill and her lips were like a furnace. She giggled some more when they got to her room and as soon as she closed the door he had her all up against the wall breathing double time as he whispered how badly he needed her, that she filled spaces in him that he never even knew were lacking; that she had gotten inside of his head, put a spell on his mind, that he was emotionally ensnared and all he did anymore was think about her, that he didn’t throw the love word around lightly. “But damn, baby,” he said as he started undoing the buttons on her soft and stiff white cotton blouse, “did I forget to tell you that I’m falling in love. Verdi Mae, I’m falling in love with you.”
She got really innocent then; blushed and looked away as he undressed her, didn’t want him to see all of her at once, even coughed nervously and sighed out a “I’m so fat,” as he clumsily attempted to peel off her tight black jeans. But then she caught his face; it was so unconnected at that moment, as if he couldn’t control his mouth that was drooping to his chest, and his eyes that were threatening to bulge from their orbits, even his nose that she loved because it was such a strong nose, defiant, was flaring uncontrollably. He looked so shamelessly vulnerable, so starved as if he was about to break out into a pant. And seeing that her bareness was affecting him so gave her confidence that began as a dot glowing from her center and then spreading out in ripples and then waves until they were both standing on top of their clothes, lips and fingers finding each other’s pulsations, their passion lifting them up and tossing them all over the blue-and-white-flowered bedspread that had been handpicked by her mother to match the rug.
And they got a rhythm going then, a back-and-forth that he was sure must have been the primal rhythm before there was music, or sound, or the universe. And she thought a similar thing. And he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out as they kept tasting each other’s mouths. He was just going to have to burst, he told himself, didn’t even know if his condom could contain it, it would likely be so profuse. But right then it happened for her; felt as if her center had shattered into a burst of iron filings so that there was no longer a rhythm, just chaotic spasms as the iron filings shimmered throughout her being, from her toes to her scalp to her soul, and she cried out then. “Mercy Jesus,” she cried. And at first he thought that he was hurting her so he eased up until she mashed her heels into the tops of his thighs and then he exploded and cried out too.
Her shyness returned afterward. As they lay facing each other on the dorm-sized single bed tingling all over and limp, she pulled the blue-flowered sheet that matched the bedspread up around her shoulders. He breathed out a laugh at that move and when she asked him what was funny he didn’t tell her that she’d just worked him like he’d never been worked before, hollered and squeezed and held on as if her raison d’être was to bring a man to unsurpassable ecstasy, and now she was covering herself up like a timid neophyte. He didn’t try to explain that it was the contraries of her nature that attracted him so, the tight black jeans and demure white shirt, her unbridled self and then covering with the sheet, that she was both virgin and harlot, and such a surprise package that he just wanted to be with her all the time to see what other sides she could show. He didn’t say any of this. Just kissed her nose, traced the outline of her lips with his tongue, then got under the blue-flowered sheet too and they kissed and touched until they were both pulsing all over again, and got back to that rhythm that was primal and loud.
They were famished after the second time and Verdi asked if there was a chance that Ronnie’s Sandwich Shop might be open, said that she’d take the half-a-mile walk up there with him right now if it meant that she’d be able to devour a big fat juicy cheese steak with sweet peppers and fried onions and ketchup.
“No need, baby,” Johnson said as he jumped up and pranced across the room to where he’d kicked off his jeans. “I’ve got a surprise that I’m going to whip on you right now and the timing couldn’t be better.”
Verdi marveled at how comfortable he seemed with his nakedness as he slowly unrolled the condom that hung like a sac filled with heavy cream. He took his time as he balled it up in a Kleenex and then wiped himself meticulously. She’d never seen a man’s naked front before and now she was staring so that she would be able to describe it to Kitt who, when she asked what did he look like—as she was bound to do—wouldn’t be referring to his face. She hoped Kitt wouldn’t be angry, she thought as she tried to memorize all the ridges and textures of Johnson’s manhood; she had promised her that she would take her time. “Always make a man wait a year,” Kitt had insisted over and over since they were thirteen. “That way you can tell whether it’s real love or bullshitting horny.” This may have been horny but it certainly wasn’t bullshit, she smiled contentedly to herself as she watched Johnson step into his jeans and heist them up in what seemed like slow motion. This was love, she wanted to sing right now, wanted to jump out of the bed and dance around the room the way her aunt Posie used to, wanted to stare at his manhood forever.
“Hey, what you looking at, baby?” he asked softly as he noticed her staring. “You looking at Andy, huh?” he said as he walked toward her, his jeans wide open.
“Andy?” She laughed and blushed and looked away. “Come on now, Johnson, you can’t be telling me that you actually have a name for—for—um—for—”
“For my penis?”
“Yeah, for your penis.” She was propped on one elbow and when the sheet fell and exposed her breasts she held back the impulse to cover herself again.
“’Course I do, got to know what to call him when I’m trying to talk him into behaving.” He jiggled it around playfully. “You know, when I see your face in a crowd, ol’ Andy gets all riled up, and I have to tell him, ‘Hold on, now, Andy, calm down, just calm down.’ And hell, don’t let my eyes even begin to fall on your beautiful behind.” He sat on the side of the bed, leaned over, and squeezed her butt. “Then I have to leave the room so I can yell at him you know, ‘Andy, sit your rebellious ass down right now.’ Then he embarrasses me, starts pouting so the whole world can see he don’t know how to behave.”
Verdi laughed hysterically and he savored the sight of her right now. Though he wanted to touch her some more, to feel her unrestraint drip between his fingers, he wanted more to watch her, sprawled back on the bed, the sheet kicked almost completely off she laughed so hard, her brown-on-gold skin glistening with muted perspiration, her hair out of the barrette and standing every which way and making her appear wild and tameless, almost erotic.
He did watch her until her laughter settled down to a cough and a sigh and a smile. And she reminded him then about the surprise. “Oh yeah, shit,” he said as he got up and zipped his jeans. “I guarantee that you’ll love them both.”
She turned into a little girl then, wrapped herself up in the flowered sheet and looked like a Roman goddess at a toga party as she jumped up and down on the bed, begging excitedly, “Tell me, let me see, come on, Johnson, tell me, let me see.”
“Okay, give me a minute, baby, just get comfortable.” He laughed as he pulled his undershirt hurriedly on. “I’ll just give you two hints, one of the surprises is stuffed in the fridge in the lounge. And the other, aha, my little pretty, the other one is tucked inside the concealed pocket of my safari jacket.”
He ran out of the room and took a quick detour into the men’s side of the dorm to use the bathroom, used the toilet, scrubbed his hands, sang out loud as he worked up a lather that he must be falling in love. He laughed and did a two-step out of the bathroom, bumped into a white boy on his way in. “Yo, sorry, man,” he said, still singing and dancing back down the hall into the lounge. The lounge was chilly, a marked lowering in the degrees, he thought as he smiled to himself at how warm Verdi’s room was right now, how burning up that sturdy twin bed. “Bed’s damn sure sturdy,” he said to the chilly lounge air as he whistled and pulled the double-bagged food from the refrigerator. He found baking tins under the sink, a small pot to go on top of the stove, really more a one-burner hot plate than a stove, but it would do for the string beans he thought as he turned the electric burner to high. He whistled louder as he assembled utensils, a knife to cut the meat loaf, a spoon for the rest, two forks for them to eat with. He stuffed the meat loaf and rice and gravy into the baking tins and got them warming in the toaster oven; filled the pot with half of the string beans and set it over the glowing circles of electric heat. He rubbed his hands together and blew into them and warmed them over the pot that started to bubble almost immediately. He stirred around in the pot and suddenly felt his mother’s sadness billow through the lounge and take over. He swallowed hard. “Not now!” he said to the lounge air. “Not here, not now. Shit! Damn! When do I get a chance to be happy?”
He headed back to Verdi’s room, loaded down with the food, saw Verdi’s next-door neighbor going in her room hugged up with the white boy he’d just seen in the bathroom. “Hey, Johnson, let me get that for you,” she said as she turned the knob to Verdi’s room. He just nodded, couldn’t say thank you trying so hard to hold the lump in the way he had been holding it in since he’d said Verdi’s name to the back of his mother’s pink crocheted sweater, and then later when he exposed his poverty to the el cashier, the way he had held it in at the roof-top lounge party when he was struck by how easily Verdi fit in with the professor and his wife, and even as he and the professor sparred academic phrases. And now when he should be the most ebullient, having just consummated his love in a divine way with the woman that would have been his dream woman had he ever given himself over to dreaming, at the point when he should be running across the campus shouting through a megaphone that he was in love, so much in love, with a sweet southern miss named Verdi Mae. He was fighting to restrain this lump in his throat that he thought was his mother’s sadness. He was all the way in the room now, Verdi wasn’t here, and he put the food on the desk and now he realized standing in this empty room that this wasn’t his mother’s sadness he was feeling, it was his own.
Happy-go-lucky, gregarious as he appeared on the exterior, he’d always had a side to him that was so lonely—even before he lost his brothers—so absent anything that looked like joy, that he sometimes worried that he’d be consumed and taken over by this forlorn self. But he’d always been able to distract himself: his studies, his BSL activities, a bottle of wine and a good party, always moving, had to be doing something, or on his way to doing something. But tonight he was in love. And with this sadness that was threatening to drizzle down his face right now as he plopped on Verdi’s bed, was an enveloping fear that his dispirited self might destroy his round at happiness, and in the process, destroy him. And Verdi too.
He sat down on the bed and shook convulsively at the very thought. He mashed his head in his hands and cried like he hadn’t cried since he was a little boy and stood at the radiator and looked out the front window and watched his father load his suitcases into the generous trunk of his brand-new ’58 Chrysler. That’s how he felt right now, like a little boy, and so abandoned.
He got himself together, then. The pepper-and-onion aromas wafting from the smoke rising off the food on the desk helped. He started talking to himself, telling himself that it would be okay, his mother, he and Verdi, his brother doing time. Everything that he cared about this night would all be okay he told himself over and over as he started taking up the food from the tins and stacking it on his mother’s brown-and-white-printed china plate.
He heard Verdi’s voice floating down the hall, heard her laughing, saying yes I’ve got company, I hear you do too. I won’t tell if you don’t. He wiped at his eyes trying to think of something funny to say so that he could laugh right away and distract her from his eyes. He hoped they weren’t wet looking or swollen. Maybe he’d return to his Andy jokes, yeah, he thought, feeling better as he remembered how hysterical Verdi had gotten over Andy.
She looked almost angelic walking through the door, wrapped up in a pink quilted, satin-collared robe, her hair repulled back into the barrette, her face freshly washed with a dab of Noxema dotted over a pimple on her chin.
“Okay, what you got for me,” she said as she hung her washcloth and towel on the bar outside of her closet.
He stood in the middle of the floor. “Drumroll, please.”
She smiled broadly and hit against her thighs in fast succession.
“Thank you, my lady,” he said as he bowed and extended his outstretched arm toward the desk. “May I present to you my mother’s very own world-famous meat loaf with rice and gravy and string beans.”
She jumped up and cheered and put her fingers to her mouth and attempted to whistle. “Bring it on, sir.” She preened, at the thought that this was her man and he was about to serve her up a meal. “Hungry as I am right now, bring it all on.”
He inched the desk out some, held back the chair, and bowed again offering her the seat.
“Ooh, ooh, we need candles,” she said as she went to her desk, rummaged through the bottom drawer, and came up with two pink tapers and two crystal candleholders. She held them up and he looked at her, them, in amazement.
“My mother is so proper,” she said as she put them all on the desk and went to the other end of the room and into the closet. “She insisted that I bring these in case I needed to entertain.” She emerged from the closet with cloth napkins. She stuck the candles in the crystal holders and lit one then the other.
He dragged the other chair over for himself and positioned his mother’s good china dish between them. “You don’t mind if we eat from the same plate, do you, Verdi?” His voice went soft and uncertain when he asked it.
“I don’t mind if we eat from the same fork,” she said, and then clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, napkins in our laps.” She smoothed a napkin over her pink quilted robe. “If my mother walked in here right now and smelled the scent of our natures, you know what she’d do, she’d put her gloved hands on her hips and she’d snap at me, ‘Verdi Mae, how dare you begin a meal without saying grace and affixing your napkin in your lap?’”
Johnson smiled and covered her hand with his. “Why don’t you, um, say it, baby.”
“Say what, cutie pie?” She reached over and pinched his cheek.
“Um, you know, a prayer, I mean, um, grace.” He took the other cloth napkin from the desk and put it in his lap. He didn’t know if it was that this napkin was so heavy, or if that’s just how cloth napkins felt.
She bowed her head and said a quick grace, then took a fork and dove into the meat loaf.
“Oh my goodness,” she blurted as she closed her eyes and tilted her head and allowed a dreamy smile to take over her face. “This is so good. I mean this is so good.” She took another forkful, and another, chirping in between about how delicious it was, how divine, how damn good, how she already loved his mother just by her food, how she loved him, told him that at least half a dozen times as she plowed through the bowl of food, taking two forkfuls to his one, stopping every so often to dab at her lips with the napkin, to look at him and smile a soft smile through the candle flame dancing from its orange-and-yellow center with a hint of blue. She looked like an angel to him sitting there in the pink quilted robe. So unspoiled. He felt himself getting filled up again as he put his fork down and just sat back and watched her eat.